FEDERATION’S REQUISITES

 

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.]

To this point, this blog has, in its account of the different obstacles facing civics teachers, described in broad strokes a number of deficient conditions.  They are the dysfunctional aspects of the nation’s political culture, the challenge of immaturity among students, and the less than optimal state of civics education.  With this posting, the blog shifts to the landscape of the political culture itself. 

Or in other words, the blog will now look at the social environmental factors that define the nation’s politics of the day.  Rightly so, the nation has cast its main attention – beyond the pandemic – on the divisive nature currently holding sway.  That divisiveness affects just about every aspect of social life – reportedly, it is even affecting family relationships – and definitely poses an obstacle to civics teachers doing their jobs. 

The aim here is to analyze this challenge and provide various insights as to its nature and suggests what teachers and other educators should do in relation to the challenge.  To be clear, what is being addressed is the polarized politics hanging over government in its attempts to issue policies.  And those affected policies seem to include just about all the possible areas in which government has a role. 

That extends to whether masks should be mandated, to what should be taught in schools, to defining who this nation’s antagonistic foes abroad are.  All of these up to the present were not controversial and summoned broad agreement across parties and other social/political divisions.

          And, as with the rest of this blog, commentary or evaluation will be offered against the stated criteria that federation theory holds, what that theory sees as beneficial, functional, and moral.  To reiterate, that would be curricular content that promotes communal, collaborative, and caring dispositions within the citizenry.  As such, the specific challenge for this review is to point out and explain how the dominance of the natural rights construct has found such aims to be misplaced and worthy of being ignored.

          And what is it about the natural rights view that makes it so problematic in terms of federal beliefs?  David Brooks, in his most recent book, provides vivid imagery of what this problematic thinking generates.  In describing the nation’s tribalism, one of the dysfunctional conditions he identifies, he writes,

Psychologists say the hardest thing to cure is the patient’s attempt to self-cure.  People who are left naked [in a self-centered society] and alone by radical individualism do what their genes and the ancient history of their species tell them to do.  They revert to tribe.  Individualism, taken too far, leads to tribalism.[1]

The main point this blog has made in terms of the natural rights view is that it promotes an extreme individualism.   

For advocates of federation theory or views one can associate with it, this is not just a matter of aesthetics or taste.  The dismissal of such concerns for community, collaboration, and care for others – or a lack of it – incorrectly instructs what the US Constitution sets forth.  It, the Constitution, established a republic based on the very communal commitment toward a polity made up of voluntary partnering – through the mechanism of a sacred compact – that unified both the people of the United States and the states of the United States.

The Latin word for this sort of leaguing is foedus – the Latin word from which federalism is derived and meaning covenant (the religious version of a compact).[2]  Now, Brooks writes of this sort of leaguing as the product of a love commitment.  That can be toward another person, as in marriage, an ideal, a place, a country.  Can a nation be based on the assumption its citizens hold to such a love?  In this, this writer questions the level of emotion Brooks ascribes to such a commitment, but the point is made.  Citizenship defined by a compact-al agreement calls for a lot.

          Should such an alignment rely on people’s natural tendencies?  Unlike with natural rights, as just indicated, which does rely heavily on natural proclivities, federation theory relies on them in part, but not totally.  Yes, humans naturally want community, but are easily convinced to seek other goals and/or to define community in a highly parochial manner.[3] 

Hence, to maintain what the founding fathers established, subsequent generations have needed to proactively promote that compact of unity.  And to do so, they have needed to socialize the populous to instill those values, attitudes, beliefs, and civic modes of behavior that promote this sense of partnership – it just doesn’t happen naturally. 

And it has become somewhat obvious, that the more recent generations have not sufficiently socialized the incoming generations so that they are disposed to meet this obligation or commitment – not to the degree the Constitution proscribes.  Instead, by adopting the natural rights view, they find policies aimed at furthering this sort of commitment as encroachments on individual prerogatives.

To be further clear, what is being referred to here, by using derivatives of the word federalism, is not the structural arrangement of the states and central government of the US.  Yes, federalism calls for a non-central arrangement of government.  That, by its nature, does include, some central entity and more local entities while withholding complete sovereignty from anyone level of governance.  But what is of more importance, is the necessary rationales for such an arrangement.   

As stated earlier in this blog, “… those processes [refer] to modes of political behavior that furthers a federated citizenry which include[s] healthy doses of social capital and civic humanism.”[4]  And such qualities presuppose a viable communal society in which its members are disposed to collaborate and cooperate in their pursuits of common endeavors broadly defined.  This is what Elazar calls a federal union’s processes.

And however one defines the terms, one can readily see that current levels of polarized politics – or tribalism, as some refer to what is going on – stands smack in the way of a people holding the necessary binding values and attitudes to pull off this active level of engagement.  To what extent is that?  Just visualize one holding a partnership in any aggregate effort such as in a marriage or a business.  It would not be based on some transaction or set of transactions, but on commitments.  How much indifference or nonchalance would such an endeavor sustain?  Not much. 

And that can go for a national unions as well.  Look around; is this nation on a dangerous path to disunity?  It almost happened before – admittedly for other reasons – and was saved by a bloody civil war.  And this writer believes that part of this current story – one mostly ignored – is how the nation’s civics education program is failing to instill – or more inoffensively stated, to encourage – the necessary disposed emotions and beliefs. 

He cannot see how true solutions to this polarization – in the long term – can be achieved without addressing the shortcomings of the nation’s civics education program.  One should remember that one cannot count on natural tendencies or rational calculations; it has to depend on its citizens learning how to be committed to others and on its people holding the necessary values, attitudes, skills, and knowledge to pull it off.  And according to Brooks, such unions depend on love.

---

[1] David Brooks, The Second Mountain:  The Quest for a Moral Life (New York, NY:  Random House), 34.

[2] Daniel J. Elazar, “Federal Models of (Civil) Authority,” Journal of Church and State, 33, 2 (March 1, 1991), 231-254.

[3] Cognitive psychologist, Steven Pinker writes of this and entails the practical realities resource scarcities have on this evolutionary trait.  See Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York, NY:  W. W. Norton and Company, 1997).

[4] A political landscape that first promotes social capital, a la Robert D. Putnam, does so by encouraging an active, public-spirited citizenry, egalitarian political relations, and a social environment of trust and cooperation.  It promotes civic humanism, as described by Isaac Kramnick, by encouraging among the citizenry that each citizen be a political actor who realizes his/her fulfilment is attained through participation in public life and a concern with public good above selfish ends.